


In my dreams I have a plan (If I got me a wealthy man)

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Cookies, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, M/M, Steve McGarrett is a good egg, mostly - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-20
Updated: 2020-02-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:28:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22811635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: Danny is turning into Steve’s driveway when he notices one of Steve’s not quite next-door neighbors in her garden, and he’s cutting power to the Camaro’s engine when he realizes that she’s left her garden and is now headed straight for him. He sighs, loud in the quiet car, and mentally prepares himself for whatever insane thing is about to happen.Or: Where does all of Steve’s money go?
Relationships: Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 32
Kudos: 432





	In my dreams I have a plan (If I got me a wealthy man)

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t think my thoughts here are particularly new to this fandom, but they’re basically this: Steve is a guy with no kids or other dependents (except maybe Eddie later on) who lives rent free in a house he inherited from his parents, probably already had a decent sum saved up at the start of the series from his time in the service, presumably (and hopefully) gets paid a very nice salary for risking his life for the Governor’s taskforce on a near-weekly basis, and is on top of all of that fairly consistently shown to be very frugal (and/or the kind of asshole who tries to trick his friends into paying for everything, depending on how you frame things). 
> 
> Apart from maybe his brief restaurant venture with Danny and two or three expensive gifts that he buys for Danny and Catherine over the course of a full ten years, there is nothing in the canon of the show to suggest he’s actually _spending_ any of the money he’s accumulating, as far as I know. So where does it go? Option one: he’s forming pyramids of gold bars in his attic because he’s secretly a shapeshifting dragon building his hoard. Option two: something else, which could for example be a little like this fic, maybe.
> 
> If you don’t recognize the title, you’ve clearly never spent hours in a car with your family listening to the same ABBA CD over and over again. Or! Perhaps I’m quick to judge and you have, but it was a CD that for some reason didn’t include _Money, Money, Money_ on its track list. Anything is possible.
> 
> Last quick note: in 10.14, we meet one of Steve’s neighbors (and she is awesome), but I had started writing this fic a good while before that, so this has nothing to do with canon in that regard. Please ignore all canon neighbor-knowledge we may have acquired recently.

Danny is turning into Steve’s driveway when he notices one of Steve’s not quite next-door neighbors in her garden, and he’s cutting power to the Camaro’s engine when he realizes that she’s left her garden and is now headed straight for him. He sighs, loud in the quiet car, and mentally prepares himself for whatever insane thing is about to happen. He knows it’s going to be insane because this is Steve’s driveway he’s parked in, and nothing in Steve’s life is ever as simple as a neighbor asking for a cup of sugar. 

Danny makes good use of the three seconds it takes to get out of the car by simultaneously considering if he could very briefly turn religious, just so he could politely ask God not to let him get shot, stabbed or hit by poison darts in the next five minutes. He decides that’s probably not how it works, but there’s no harm in trying.

The woman is waiting for Danny by the back of his car. She’s dressed like she’s been hanging out at home – T-shirt and flowy ankle-length skirt, hair up in a bun – and she’s maybe a few years older than Danny, but not by much. He thinks he vaguely remembers her from a garden barbecue Steve hosted for the entire street years ago, which he accidentally crashed because Steve had neither invited him, nor bothered to warn him off of spontaneously dropping by to see if Steve wanted to have dinner together. They did have that dinner, in the end, just with three dozen strangers milling around Steve’s backyard and offering Danny salads that were fifty percent mayonnaise.

“Hello,” the vaguely familiar woman says now. She doesn’t look crazy, furious or otherwise homicidal, which Danny considers a decent start. She seems a little nervous, though. “You’re Steve’s partner, right?”

He stashes the car keys in his pants pocket, because it looks like it might be a while before he can drop them in the bowl on the side table near Steve’s door, where they spend most of their time these days. “At work, yeah.” It’s an automatic reply – so many people end up getting the wrong impression if he doesn’t clarify – but recently he’s started feeling a little foolish giving it. Partner at work who these days also kisses Steve outside of work sometimes, what’s the word for that? “Can I help you with something?”

“I’m the neighbor from two doors down,” the woman says, which Danny already knew. “Could you make sure Steve gets these cookies?” She presses an elegantly foil-wrapped package he hadn’t realized she was holding at him and he accepts it out of necessity, so it doesn’t get dropped and all the mouthwateringly golden brown cookies don’t end up as crumbs. “Maybe tell him they’re from you?” she asks, hopefully.

He stops admiring the cookie color and puts them under closer scrutiny. “Why? Are they safe to eat?”

“Yes.” The woman seems confused he’d ask. “I made them myself. They’re an assortment of my mother’s recipes. If I remember correctly from a talk we once had, Steve really loves macarons.”

She’s right – Steve does enjoy a good macaron, even more so because he doesn’t get to eat a lot of them because they don’t count as relaxing Sunday baking to Danny. Macarons don’t play well with moisture, which makes them a tricky cookie to get right in Hawaii’s wet heat, and they’re a fussy and relatively expensive one everywhere, with all that almond flour. “Then why don’t you come in and hand them to him yourself?” Danny offers, because he’s reasonably convinced this woman probably harbors no ill intentions beyond feeding Steve sugary stuff.

She picks that moment to start to look shifty again. She wrings her hands. “I don’t want him to know it’s from me. It might embarrass him.”

“He’s not that easy to embarrass,” Danny assures her. “He’s done too many stupid things in his life not to get used to the sensation.”

“That’s the thing, he did something wonderful.” She must see him be confused still, because she glances at the house as if to make sure Steve hasn’t spotted them yet. The house is partially obscured by plants in the garden and Steve is not usually glued to the front window like a dog waiting for Danny to show up, so her chances are good. She leans in a little, like she’s about to share a secret, which both spikes Danny’s nerves and tickles his curiosity. “My husband and I haven’t been announcing it, but we’ve been going through a financially tough time lately and people here know.” She twirls a finger in a circle that’s presumably supposed to encompass the neighborhood.

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Danny is no less confused yet, but he vividly remembers what it was like when he first got to the island and was struggling to make ends meet, and none of it was fun or healthy.

She gives a little nod and smile of acknowledgement and continues her story. “When my twins’ birthday rolled around, we scraped together everything we could, but frankly, we weren’t sure how we were going to pay for the candles on the cake without losing the house, let alone raise funds for a present that two eleven-year-old girls wouldn’t think of as silly. And then, on the morning of their birthday, I got up early to go to the store and when I set foot out the door, there it was, two surfboards in perfect shape leaning against the side of the house, with wax and everything you’d need included, and a card saying congratulations and that it was a present from the neighborhood.”

Danny notes his own lack of surprise at the twist being surfing-related. He’s been living on an island for too long. “That’s fortuitous,” he says, and he really, really knows that he’s spent too many years of his life here when he realizes that he actually means it. He feels a spike of excitement for the idea of these two kids getting to enjoy the water.

“Yes!” the woman agrees, laughing in a way that sounds wet, like she’s close to tears. “Their cousin is an aspiring pro who immediately offered to give the girls a refresher on their beginners lessons from years ago, and they had their best day in months and got to forget all about the troubles at home for a little while. We all did, to be honest. It was a miracle, but later I asked around, and nobody around here seemed to know anything, until Peter from across the street said a similar thing had happened to him when his dog got hit by a car that kept driving, and he later received a letter saying a small portion of their veterinary bills had been paid off by an anonymous benefactor. When he checked, half the outstanding amount had been covered and his security cameras revealed the letter was delivered by Steve.”

It’s been coming for a while now, this second twist. “Steve,” Danny says, just to doublecheck, because somehow it still catches him unawares. “My Steve?” He gestures at the house. “This Steve?”

The woman laughs at his surprise. “You know him better than I do. Is it that hard to believe?”

Danny opens his mouth to say that yes, hearing that the man who never even pays for his for his own meals if he can help it has been throwing extravagant amounts of money at neighbors he barely knows does seem a little strange, but the words die in his throat. Steve, going to ridiculous lengths to help people, even if it’s at great personal cost – that’s nothing if not perfectly in character. Danny has just rarely seen him give away something as trivial as money rather than a piece of his own health and sanity.

“I’m taking that as a no,” the woman tells him kindly, when he’s been stuck with his mouth open for more than a few seconds. “Will you give him the cookies? I have no idea how to ever repay him, but it’s the least I could do.”

Danny looks down at the cookies he’s still holding, which he’d completely forgotten about. “No, this is good. He wouldn’t want any money.”

“It’s not the money I wish I could give back.” There are definitely tears brimming in the woman’s eyes now. She reaches out and clasps Danny’s arm, squeezes. “It’s the gesture. He gave us hope.”

Danny feels like he’s just been hit in the chest by a ton of bricks, or maybe like he’s staring into a mirror at a version of himself he never would have shown anyone on earth, but that’s not that far behind him at all. “Yeah,” he says dumbly. “He’s good at that, isn’t he?”

The woman lets go of him, wipes away her tears and gets him to confirm in words that he promises to deliver the cookies and that he won’t say a thing about where they came from. She thanks him, thanks him again, and then retreats back to her own garden with a final smile.

When she’s gone, Danny keeps a tight hold of the cookies and leans against his car for a minute, head resting on his forearm. Once he’s really sure he won’t end up scaring Steve shitless by randomly starting to cry, he finally heads inside, barely ten minutes later than he originally intended. It feels like at least a week must have passed.

He finds Steve sitting on the couch. Eddie is next to him, patiently letting Steve go over every single inch of his fur with the baby brush that once used to belong to Charlie. “Yo,” Steve says, without looking up from his task, like they only just saw each other yesterday. Which they did.

“I come bearing gifts,” Danny announces. His voice is dry as always, which is good. 

He drops the cookies on the coffee table and Steve immediately puts down his brush and scoots forward to inspect them. Eddie takes the reprieve to hop down from the couch and make his escape to the dog pillow on the other side of the room.

“Ooh. Did you make these?” Steve takes a good look at the wrapping and prods the perfect bow tied around the package and answers his own question. “You did not make these.”

“Very astutely observed.” Danny kicks off his sneakers and leaves them next to the door, lined up with three pairs of Steve’s shoes and one of Danny’s that he was looking for at his own place the other day. He should’ve guessed – most things he loses can be found with Steve. Car keys, shoes, his heart. “We’ll make a detective out of you yet.”

“Pff,” says Steve, unaware of Danny’s sappy internal monologue. “Where’d you get them?”

Danny nudges Steve’s knee until Steve pulls back from his cookie inspection enough so that Danny can pass in front of him and get comfortable in the Danny-shaped dent on Steve’s couch. It’s lined with a little more fur than usual, but his ass will deal. “I got them,” he says. He puts it like it’s an answer even though it’s clearly not one, both because he knows the cryptic nature of it will drive Steve a little mad and that’s always fun, and because in this particular case, giving vague answers is something of a necessity if he wants to keep his promise. “They were given to me.”

As predicted, Steve wrinkles his forehead in consternation. “Given to you? By who?”

“By whom.”

Steve’s eyebrows shoot up and his face clears. “Just for that, you gotta give me half. You can’t walk into a man’s home and correct his grammar without paying the price.” He seems to take his own word as law, because he pulls on the ends of the decorative bow until he can unfold the top of the package enough to get his hands on the actual contents.

Danny manages a pretty good indignant laugh. It’s not that hard, because even if they’re technically not Danny’s cookies, Steve thinks they are, and he’s helping himself to them anyway. “You just want free cookies, you cheapskate.”

“Guilty as charged.” Steve digs through his own present like a thief. His eyes light up. “Holy shit, there are macarons.”

“Leave some for me,” Danny says, even while he already knows he’ll probably let Steve have all of them. He’s more of a chocolate chip kind of guy himself, anyway.

“Isn’t it funny,” Steve says, mouth already full of macaron and holding another one up to the light between two fingers to admire it, “how such a small thing can make life so much better?”

Danny huffs, pushes in close to Steve’s side and starts batting Steve’s greedy hands away from the macarons, just because he can and because Steve is right: it’s all in the little things.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! After years of arduous research I have scientifically determined that comments are very cool, so if you want to leave one, that'd be cool, too. ❤
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


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